Carol Loose

The abdicated Crown Prince Carol of Rumania, estranged father of six-year-old King Mihai, suddenly moved from his retreat near Paris to Nice, French Riviera, and stopped last week at the dazzlingly white and sumptuous Hotel Negresco.

Clearly flushed with hopes and expectations, Prince Carol talked with blazing indiscretion to correspondents while he smoked innumerable cigarets. Said he: "I wish to qualify a statement recently made by one of my aides that I will be upon the Rumanian throne in two months. That was merely his personal opinion. It may be two months or it may be two years.

"My mother [Dowager], Queen Marie, and my sister, Princess Ileana, will soon visit me in Paris. It is a fact that important political events are occurring in Rumania. That is the reason my mother is coming to confer with me."

Motoring from Nice to Monte Carlo, Prince Carol conferred there with the one Rumanian who can conceivably set him upon the throne, M. Juliu Maniu, doughty Leader of the Rumanian Peasant Party (Opposition). At peasant mass meetings throughout Rumania, M. Maniu has furiously denounced the Government of Premier Vintila Bratiano and skirted treason by dark hints against the Regency. That the leading opposition statesman should thus journey all the way from Bucharest to Monte Carlo for a conference with Prince Carol gave an aura of importance, at last, to that loose-lipped, irresolute young man.

Though Prince Carol abdicated of his own free will, and in Italy where he could scarcely have been forcibly brought to do so (TIME, Jan. 11, 1926), he began almost at once to itch for the sceptre which would otherwise have been his when King Ferdinand of Rumania died (TIME, Aug. 1). The reasons for his abdication may remain forever partially obscure, but it is clear that they originated in his desire to escape the responsibilities of rank and dwell inconspicuously with various ladies. The latest of these, Mme. Magda Lupescu, comely Jewess, was sharing Prince Carol's suite at the Negresco, last week.

The one definite result of Prince Carol's presence in Nice and Monte Carlo was to interrupt momentarily certain German-Rumanian financial negotiations which had been proceeding quietly at nearby Mentone. There Foreign Minister Dr. Gustav Stresemann of Germany was taking an industrious rest cure at the sunny Hotel Cap Martin (TIME, Feb. 13). He had been joined by Foreign Minister Nicholas Titulescu of Rumania, who recently visited Rome and Paris; and with the arrival of German Finance Minister Heinrich Koehler the negotiations were in full swing. They related to Rumania's claim upon Germany for redemption of the German paper marks which were spent in Rumania by the German forces of occupation during the World War.

No sooner did Prince Carol arrive in Nice than M. Titulescu, desiring to avoid all contact with him, moved himself and suite across the border from French Mentone to nearby Italian San Remo. Good natured Dr. Stresemann then kept the negotiations going by motoring back and forth between these neighboring towns. Prince Carol, not provided with papers permitting him to enter Italy, could not and possibly did not desire to make contact with the Foreign Minister of the Rumanian Government with which he is at odds.

At London a conference was in progress, last week, between Governor of the Bank of France Emile Moreau and Governor of the Bank of England Montagu Norman. They were reported to be entertaining favorably proposals made at Paris by M. Titulescu which look toward the stabilization of the Rumanian leu by an international loan.